Friends, all I can say is that Elvis has left the building, and apparently, so has justice…  However, it is important to know the truth, and that, this firm will keep fighting for our clients.

The Court of Appeals, Fifth District, Dallas has reversed and rendered in the Barbara Behringer and Leroy Behringer case.  See cause No. 05-06-00136-CV or 2007 Tex. App. LEXIS 5969.  The Behringers filed suit claiming that their injuries resulted from ALCOA’s wrongful acts a.k.a. negligence, and the jury agreed, that Mrs. Barbara Behringer’s mesothelioma was caused by her washing her husband’s work clothes in the 1950’s that were covered in asbestos dust.  Her husband worked for ALCOA.     

(As learned in Professor Morrison’s Tort class at Baylor Law School, negligence has 4 elements which are as follows: duty, breach of duty, proximate causation, and damages.)  Professor taught foreseeability this way – if you took out a clean white sheet of paper and wrote down who could get hurt by this breached duty…whoever is on that piece of paper is foreseeable.  Well friends, Mrs. Barbara Behringer is on my paper, but apparently, this is not so with the Court of Appeals, Fifth District, Dallas.      

The Court of Appeals reasoned that Mrs. Barbara Behringer’s mesothelioma was not foreseeable to ALCOA.  And thus, since foreseeability was the foremost consideration in the legal duty analysis, held that ALCOA owed no legal duty to Mrs. Barbara Behringer.

Even though ALCOA’s actions or inactions resulted in a most painful death by mesothelioma wherein one drowns in their own lungs.  To date, mesothelioma has no known cure.